Section B: Beyond the First Leg - Why we need to focus more pointedly on top-end corporate compensation with a Second Leg

As I reflected on the implications of the First Leg of the POPE system, it became apparent that, while straightening pay graphs would be a useful start to mending the mal-distribution of means in the middle of the American financial spectrum, it only addressed half of the problem of inequity - namely, stealing from the middle.
By itself, the First Leg - the program that rewards straightening of company pay graphs - could only go so far toward the overall goal of improving social equity in America. Though it would help to regularize the distribution of pay within any given company's pay structure, the perceptive reader might note that it would do nothing to discourage executives shifting pay from the very lowest paid to the middle, in an effort to meet program requirements without reducing their own pay, which would create an even worse condition of pay inequity. That would be a catastrophe! Nor would it do anything to level the playing field between cash-rich companies and companies on a tight financial leash or go to bat for companies that provide higher levels of employment opportunity for the income they bring in, versus those who opt to replace workers with mechanized production so that shareholders and executives can fatten their take, while their laid-off workers deal with the challenges and terrors of losing their livelihoods.
While I have nothing against companies trying to become more efficient when not doing so threatens their ability to stay afloat, I draw the line when it is done for no better purpose than cutting some people out of sharing in the general providence for the sole purpose of inflating the wallets of top dogs and shareholders. I stand by this even though I'm just as capable as the next guy of feeling good when the stocks I own rise in value. Social gain trumps personal gain.
For that reason, I knew that I had to add a Second Leg to work in concert with the First Leg to reduce the concentration of pay at the top and shift more pay to the bottom. Straightening the graph would not be enough: the high end had to be pulled down and the low end up, as well. In order to make that happen, the system would need a much more pointed stick than any associated with POPE's First Leg. This stick would have to be directed very specifically at the rump of the pay packages accorded the top three in the pay hierarchy of each company electing to participate in POPE. I settled on the idea of making eligibility for POPE back-up being contingent on the top three positions agreeing to pay an equity-responsive membership fee. The fee would be a percentage of their pay, determined by a complex formula applied to their total compensation package, minus the amount of federal income tax they had paid. In the interests of reasonability, the formula would factor in the context in which that pay was earned.
Once I had an acceptable Second Leg, I would have a persuasive companion measure to the initiative to straighten company pay graphs that might coax the more stupendously compensated into thinking that the American economy, at heart, was really more about sharing than about shaving.